Re: Footnotes and Tooltips

It isn't the mose hover functionality that is the problem in the popup
method. In mouse use it doesn't matter if the popup overlays other content
on hover because the user simply moves the pointer away to stop the hover
and they can see the content again.

The issue of obscuring content potentially occurs in keyboard navigation
where users use the Tab key to jump from one link or button to the next. If
the popup/tooltip appears as soon as keyboard focus lands on the footnote
reference, then that is an accessibility issue for those users as it hides
what's underneath (and also because it foreces them to see the popup text
when they haven.t asked to do so). That is why the references must be
marked up as buttons that only reveal the popup if the keyboard user
presses Enter or Spacebar. That way the keyboard user can read the ordinary
content first, and they only get to see the popup text if they specifically
ask to, i.e. if they operate the button.

So I hope that makes it clearer, and maybe it also explains why Caroline's
vendor found an issue with it? (- if they had some other problem with it
perhaps you could share exactly what they actually said about it so we can
consider that. But I am not clear why you say the mouse user has to "click
away" to see the underlying content if they used hover to see it? It looks
like they weren't looking at a hover case).

Jeanna, I suggested the popup method (and your client asked for that) as an
alternative to showing footnotes, not in addition to them. There is no
actual need to show the footnotes at all if the same texts are shown as
popups. You might feel that it is good to show the footnotes at the bottom
as well (and if the footnotes are specially important legally your legal
people might insist on it), but in that case there would be no need to
provide any mechanism to jump down to them from the references because the
popup texts do that job for all users including blind and keyboard users -
if marked up correctly. I agree trying to make the references both open a
popup and provide a link to a footnote certainly would be difficult, but
that is not the intention of this method.

Finally, screen reader users can hear what's in the popup boxes when they
appear. In your case the developer must give the popup container an
aria-labelledby attribute that references the text in the popup (i.e. what
you originally has as a footnote). Then when the popup appears they must
use the JavaScript focus() function to place focus on the container; that
triggers screen readers into announcing the text inside it. That is just
standard practice for all popup dialogs. So all users are accounted for by
this method, no one has to navigate down to footnotes at the bottom of the
page.

Regards,
Guy Hickling